The Leonard Cohen song David Gilmour couldn’t live without
Don’t be fooled by his geography teacher demeanour; David Gilmour is most certainly a rock god. The guitarist rose to fame just as Pink Floyd frontman Syd Barrett was beginning to sink beneath a wave of (probably drug-induced) psychosis. So many years later, his influence on rock music is as apparent as ever. We join the psych icon as he discusses the importance of Leonard Cohen’s music.
Gilmour joined the Floyd shortly after the release of their debut album The Piper At The Gates of Dawn – a reference to a particularly mystical chapter in Graham Green’s children’s book The Wind In The Willows, as it happens. After years of busking around Europe, Gilmour returned to England to pick up some new equipment. He was fortunate enough to watch Pink Floyd record ‘See Emily Play’ but was surprised to find that his old friend Syd – now suffering from some pretty serious mental health problems – no longer recognised him.
Later that year, Nick Mason invited Gilmour to cover for Barrett, who by that point was erratic to the point of mania. Though the initial plan had been to use Gilmour as a temporary foil for Barrett’s eccentricities, by March 1968, Syd had agreed to leave the band for good. With that, Pink Floyd commenced a new chapter, one that would see them release everything from 1973’s Dark Side Of The Moon to 1979’s The Wall.
Decades later, Gilmour was invited onto the long-running BBC interview series Desert Island Discs, in which guests are asked to provide the eight tracks that couldn’t live without. Discussing his fifth track, ‘Anthem’ by Leonard Cohen, Gilmour described the singer-songwriter as one of his “favourite artists”, observing how the 1992 single has a “slight Islamic thing to it; the imperfection that all Islamic art has to have in it”.
Featured prominently in Olive Stones’ 1994 film Natural Born Killers, ‘Anthem’ was recorded by Cohen at the house of actress Rebecca De Mornay, who he was darting at the time. Speaking to Uncut in 2014, De Mornay recalled how the song came together: “Leonard was at my house, and I had a synthesizer,” she said. “He was off in a room, playing a song that I’d heard him play over and over for a couple of years, that he just wasn’t sure what to do with. I went in and said, ‘That’s it! Exactly like that!’ I think he’d moved the lyrics around, because they’d never had that effect on me before. I said, ‘It’s universal, I’m telling you, like ‘Silent Night’, or ‘Auld Lang Syne’, so why don’t we bring in a gospel choir?’ And he turned and looked at me very strangely. And he said, ‘I want you to produce this song.”
For Gilmour, Cohen wasn’t just a brilliant lyricist; he was a much under-appreciated guitarist too. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2021, Gilmour spoke about what he’d learnt from playing Cohen’s songs live. “One thing I did learn is how bloody good he is as a guitar player,” he began. “You tend to think of singer-songwriters as people who are just using the guitar accompaniment to carry the words that they’re doing, but Leonard was an absolutely brilliantly accomplished guitar player in fingerstyle things that I just cannot do. And of course, he’s about the best lyricist that I know of.” High praise indeed.
